Poets/Poetry

Composed poetry … like a dancer working at the barre, continually exercising the power of imagining, like a muscle that demanded flexing and stretching —Arthur A. Cohen

Explaining how you write poetry … it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife —Phillip Larkin

He [the poet] approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification —E. B. White

Like science, poetry must fix its thought in thing and symbol —Dilys Laing

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting —Robert Frost

Like marijuana smoke are poet’s verses —Jaroslav Seifert

Poems are like people … there are not many authentic ones around —Robert Graves

The poet is like the prince of the clouds who rides the tempest … exiled on the ground, amidst boos and insults, his giant’s wings prevent his walking —Charles Baudelaire

Poetry is like light —Delmore Schwartz

Poetry is like painting; one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance —Horace

Poetry … is like spray blown by some wind from a heaving sea, or like sparks blown from a smouldering fire: a cry which the violence of circumstances wrings from some poor fellow —George Santayana

Poets … are conductors of the senses of men, as teachers and preachers are the insulators —Karl Shapiro

The simile is taken from a prose poem entitled As You Say (not without sadness), Poets Don’t See They Feel It contains another simile which sheds light on the poet as one who strips away insulation: “He pulls at the seams [of insulation] like a boy whose trousers are cutting him in half.”

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things —Robert Frost

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo —Don Marquis, The Sun Dial, 1878

Rhymes you as fast as a sailor will swear —Babette Deutsch

The simile is from a poem honoring John Skelton.

They [poets] are honored and ignored like famous dead Presidents —Delmore Schwartz

To try to read a poem with the eyes of the first reader who read it is like trying to see a landscape without the atmosphere that clothes it —W. Somerset Maugham

To write a lyric is like having a fit, you can’t have one when you wish you could … and you can’t help having it when it comes itself —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down —Robert Frost

lyric - of or relating to a category of poetry that expresses emotion (often in a songlike way); "lyric poetry"

sweet, sweetly - in an affectionate or loving manner (`sweet' is sometimes a poetic or informal variant of `sweetly'); "Susan Hayward plays the wife sharply and sweetly"; "how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank"- Shakespeare; "talking sweet to each other"

2.

poetry - any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling

expressive style, style - a way of expressing something (in language or art or music etc.) that is characteristic of a particular person or group of people or period; "all the reporters were expected to adopt the style of the newspaper"

poetry

Quotations"Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense" [Isaac Barrow]"Poetry is what gets lost in translation" [Robert Frost]"Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen" [Fleur Adcock]"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" [William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads (preface)]"Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life" [Matthew Arnold Essays in Criticism]"Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry" [Gustave Flaubert letter]"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat" [Robert Frost]"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines" [Lord Macaulay Essays]"Poetry (is) a speaking picture, with this end; to teach and delight" [Sir Philip Sidney The Defence of Poetry]"Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes" [Joseph Roux Meditations of a Parish Priest]"Prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order" [Samuel Taylor Coleridge Table Talk]"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them" [Marianne Moore Poetry]"Poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history" [Aristotle Poetics]"Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it" [Jeremy Bentham]"I am two fools, I know,""For loving, and for saying so""In whining poetry" [John Donne The Triple Fool]"Poetry's a mere drug, Sir" [George Farquhar Love and a Battle]"If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all" [John Keats letter]"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo" [Don Marquis]"Most people ignore most poetry""because""most poetry ignores most people" [Adrian Mitchell Poems]"All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose" [Molière Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme]"it is not poetry, but prose run mad" [Alexander Pope An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot]

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